DNA and x-rays reveal their secrets

Since the Middle Ages and the creation of the very first “cabinets of curiosities”, these ancestors of museums, mummies have fascinated. Because they refer to the desire to overcome death and to the unusual permanence of bodies; because they bring up a snapshot of the past. To celebrate ten years since its reopening, the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, which has seventy mummies in its own collections, has decided to look into this delicate subject with a major exhibition.

Delicate, because it is not easy to present human remains to the public. “In the United States today, it has even become impossible,” explains anthropologist Pascal Sellier, one of the exhibition’s curators. On the contrary, we want to show that it is possible to have a scientific discourse on the subject, without any voyeurism, by explaining that these mummies are not simple objects. »

Thus, in each room, a curtain on the window avoids being surprised by the presence of the mummy which we only discover slowly and only if we wish. For each, an “identity booklet” indicates what we know – and what we don’t know – about an Egyptian baby of around six months or a young woman from the Andes… However, the exhibition is not recommended for those under 12 years old.

Adults who enjoy the history of science or ethnology, on the other hand, will find it fascinating, as it addresses all aspects of a funerary practice that dates back at least to the 8th millennium BC with the masked mummies of the Chin-Chorro culture, discovered in Chile.

With or without offerings

“This practice is always part of a complex funeral rite which varies greatly from one civilization to another,” explains Pascal Sellier, who presents in the first part the various ways of preserving and then displaying the body, with offerings or not.

If the way in which the Egyptians honored their dead is well known, we discover for example that in the Marquesas, until the end of the 18th century, the deceased of high society were mummified for only a few years. Their skulls were then exhumed to be decorated, and the bones were collected and reburied…

The route then retraces how these human remains ended up in museums, during the scientific expeditions of the 19th century – that of Bonaparte in Egypt, in 1798, or those which, from 1850, discovered the pre-Columbian civilizations of South America. A sort of coffin display shows how mummies were once “hung” to display them. “Today, we present them more gently, in the position in which they were in their tomb,” specifies the commissioner.

Make a mummy talk

The last part tells precisely how we take care of the mummies, which are very fragile, but also how we “make them talk” by x-raying them, taking their DNA, studying their clothes… We can then learn more about the illnesses of the deceased, the conditions of their death, their geographical and social origins.

The example, perhaps the most moving, is that of a little girl in Strasbourg. Wearing jewelry and lace that signal an aristocratic origin, she died between 1625 and 1640 and was embalmed, presumably to be returned to her family in Germany. For unknown reasons, it remained in Strasbourg where it was exhibited, in the 19th century, as a curiosity. A video tells how researchers have combed through the archives to try to find his identity and hope that his DNA will help verify one or other of their hypotheses.

If the presence of around ten works of contemporary art, poorly identified in the middle of the windows, does not add much, this rich exhibition wins its bet of having broadened our knowledge, with respect for the deceased.